


The one where quan chi isn't a POS

by Necro (Charlie_M)



Series: Phoenix Rising [8]
Category: Mortal Kombat (Video Games), Mortal Kombat - All Media Types
Genre: AU to Blind Vengeance, Crack, Disaster Twins, Family Dynamics, Fluff and Humor, Nix and Nathan aren't terribly traumatized, No Angst, No abuse, Not Serious, Serious matters taken as a joke, They traumatize everyone else, They're the weirdest fucking gargoyle kids and Quan Chi is so fucking tired, ignore the change in tenses midway through, indestructible children, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:07:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23551276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charlie_M/pseuds/Necro
Summary: Essentially what it says in the title. An alternative to Blind Vengeance in which Quan Chi isn't a terrible parent, Nix and Nathan aren't traumatized, and they're all about as weird as you'd expect them to be. That is to say, they're super fucking weird.(You don't have to read Blind Vengeance, but reading one of my other works to know who Nix and Nathan are might help)
Series: Phoenix Rising [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1249661
Comments: 9
Kudos: 14





	The one where quan chi isn't a POS

**Author's Note:**

> I'm doing this instead of updating anything I actually should be working on. Like the smut scene for Blind Vengeance.
> 
> All I could think about is how fucking weird and wild their childhood would have been if Quan Chi hadn't been such a piece of shit.

Quan Chi wasn’t familiar with children, but he was pretty sure this wasn’t how they were supposed to be.

“Nix, look, its guts are everywhere!”

A delighted laugh. “Ew!” A pause. “Poke it with a stick!”

Given that the palace had its fair share of lurking horrors, it could have had something to do with exposure. But there was also Kitana, Jade, and Skarlet for comparison (not that they were paragons of normalcy either) and they weren’t…

“Uncle, I learned something new!” Nix announced with a proud smile. She could barely peek over his giant desk but he could already see that her hair had become a tangled mess in the single hour since it had been so carefully braided.

“And what would that be, child?” he asked.

“Arson!”

No, he was pretty sure that crossing dimensions had broken something in their tiny brains. Some piece of humanity that should have been there, some bit of sanity that would probably never grow right if their current development was anything to go by.

“I’m going to commit a crime!”

“Not if I commit one first!”

This was not what he’d anticipated when he first realized he’d been saddled with twins whose latent psychic abilities were frankly astounding. He’d expected the potential to mold them, shape them into tools for his work. How hard could it be to herd a pair of children, barely a decade to their existence, into obedient utility?

“By the gods!” Shang Tsung’s voice rang down the hall even before his stomping carried him to Quan Chi’s obliterated office. It said a lot that he was actually audible over the shrieking of the twins, falling through an infinite portal in the corner.

“What did they do this time?” Quan Chi sighed.

(He had not slept in three days because some well-meaning and naive palace cook had given the twins a single bar of chocolate. At least he assumed that the cook had done it of their own free will, but there was a very good chance the woman had been telepathically coerced into it.)

“My entire lab,” Shang Tsung seethed, “has been—”

He stopped to ogle at the loop of infinite descent, then shook himself.

“My entire lab is on fire!”

Quan Chi, pushed himself away from his desk— two whole documents had been addressed, a new record, so it was no surprise that he’d been interrupted— and trudged to his latest device to occupy his niece and nephew.

One hand darted out, catching Nathan by the back of his shirt and hauling him out. The portal on the floor closed, and Nix caught neatly around the middle with Quan Chi’s other arm. She was giggling maniacally and wiggling even as he turned to Shang Tsung.

“You were saying?”

“My lab!”

The children stopped laughing long enough to peer between the two sorcerers with interest.

“Children,” Quan Chi intoned, so  _ so _ tired, “we don’t set our friends or their things on fire.”

“But  _ you said _ that you didn’t trust Shang Tsung as far as you could throw him!” Nathan said.

“And  _ you said _ that he couldn’t—” Nathan made an  _ oof _ sound as he hit the floor face-first, Quan Chi’s hand now free to cover Nix’s mouth.

“Stop repeating me,” he commanded. He’d been drunk when he said those things, they should hardly be held against him.

Nathan rolled over onto his back to cackle. Quan Chi ignored Nix licking his hand to get herself free, though started a mental timer.

“They are menaces!” Shang Tsung raged. “Animals!”

“No, they’re children.”

Nathan was standing up slowly, doing an uncanny impression of a reanimated corpse. He’d seen enough of them to know how to do it right, and took great pride in his renditions.

“I see little difference.”

Quan Chi dropped his hand just as Nix’s teeth snapped together.

“The children hold grudges.”

Nix wiggled to be set down and no sooner had her feet touched the ground than Nathan launched at her, the two rolling into a stack of priceless ancient tomes. Quan Chi didn’t even twitch to look.

Shang Tsung jerked back, lip curling in dignified disgust. “They need to be put on leashes.”

“That’s hardly a solution.” He’d tried. It took a knife and three hours to untangle the three of them.

“I can’t tolerate this any longer,” Shang Tsung declared. “Do something about their behavior or I will.”

The movement Quan Chi had been monitoring from the corner of his eye ceased. He turned, because fine-tuned instinct told him something was about to go very wrong. The twins had frozen mid-wrestle, staring at Shang Tsung with an intensity he’d seen in starving animals.

“I am genuinely interested to see you try,” Quan Chi mused.

There was no warning. They were just suddenly bolting after Shang Tsung as he yelped and stumbled back into the hallway. Quan Chi checked his timepiece. He’d have perhaps twenty minutes to work before the children found their way back.

It’s meeting-day for Quan Chi. It’s also his least favorite day of the month. He is even less prepared for it than usual because his sleep was interrupted. Again.

(Nix shakes him awake in the small hours of the morning. The twins’ room is attached to his but trying to bar them from entering is more trouble than it's worth. Most nights, the worst either of them do is crouch on a piece of furniture and stare at him until the sun rises.

“Uncle,” she whispers at the same volume most people yell, “uncle, are you awake?”

“What is it, child?”

“I wanna give birds people-teeth.”

He processes that for a moment. “In the morning.”

“But what if the birds are gone in the morning?”

He doesn’t ask why she would think that, because the answer will probably keep him up for the rest of the night.

“Stay within the palace grounds.” He rolls over and tries to sleep. He is haunted by the thought of her actually managing to catch a bird, though the chances are very slim. The birds here are slightly smart than ten-year-olds, at least.)

He is also sporting a number of handprints in various colors from his legs to his face, because a well-meaning maid suggested that a morning paint session would help the twins expend some energy. It did not, and also Nathan took great care to make him and his sister look like gruesome murder victims with the red paint.

The hair on one side of Nix’s head is matted down and sticky as it dries and it’ll take Quan Chi half an hour to untangle it later (because if anyone but him or Nathan lays a hand on her hair she screams like a banshee and breaks every piece of glass in her radius) but he’s not going to think about that right now. The first general who sees her goes pale but Quan Chi shuffles through his documents, ignoring the scribbles that cover the margins.

“Is she—”

“Unfortunately, she’s fine. Sit down, they can sense fear.”

It is true and also too late. Nathan pounces on the man from the rafters, babbling an unnervingly accurate reprisal of a monologue from a play they watched two weeks ago.

“The artifacts your soldiers found in those ruins,” Quan Chi focuses the man, even as Nathan slides off his shoulder and onto stone, Nix beginning the next part of the scene without pause.

Their favorite game is to scuttle around the dark rafters making unholy noises— one of the few that tend to benefit Quan Chi— and they manage to entertain themselves with that through two more meetings. He knows that the reprieve is about to end midway through through the third when he hears battle cries, and then a crash, and then Nix puts a crack in the floor when she falls.

“I lost!” she announces with such shock, it’s almost like this hasn’t happened repeatedly for the last three months.

“Your brother is bigger than you,” Quan Chi reminds, interrupting himself this time.

“Ah!” she says in response, as if this is also news, and very inconvenient at that.

Lunch is the only time they are silent for any length of time, and also, somehow, the least messy. Nix sits in Quan Chi’s lap while Nathan leans against his side. Occasionally, one of them offers him a piece of whatever they’re eating— nothing too sugary and nutritionally balanced because he’s not  _ neglecting  _ them— and it’s less work to simply accept.

No one is foolish enough to comment on it; one of his few blessings. Nathan dozes off for twenty minutes with his stomach full and Nix remains to let her food settle. Quan Chi manages three more efficient meetings before Nix gets sick of sitting still.

She clambers from his lap and starts constructing something from the various pillows, rugs, and tapestries around the meeting chamber. When she’s finished, she sneaks up to her brother despite Quan Chi’s warning look. Not that it matters when she gets too close and Nathan springs, fully conscious, both of them tumbling into her fort.

His biggest and longest meeting is scheduled for the end of the day, General Reiko included amongst those in attendance. This is a mistake on all accounts. Nix and Nathan have gotten their second wind, and the energy of several people in one place makes them even more excitable.

They play several rounds of rafter jousting (in which Nix always loses and is always surprised) followed by an incomprehensible game where they run full force into the walls, bouncing off and looking googly-eyed. And finally, they invent something new, in which one attempts to balance on ever-taller constructs, while the other tries to make them fall  _ without _ outright pushing them off.

Quan Chi knows this because they’re shouting the rules at each other and he’s making sure they don’t break anything important (ie: a vase). They get through three rounds of this before Nix lands on Reiko, who, like Shang Tsung, would love nothing more than to throw them from the tower in which they are hosting their meeting. Today, he does.

Nix goes flying out the window with a screech, Nathan runs to the sill with an awed gasp, Quan Chi does not look up from his paperwork. A few seconds later there is a splash, the guards at the moat exclaim in horror as they try to pull her out, while she presumably makes friends with the creatures that live in said moat.

Nathan darts to Reiko’s side and yanks on the straps across his chest. “ME NEXT!”

Quan Chi still does not look up. Nathan is also tossed out the window, whooping in triumph. The guards are earning their salaries today.

Ten minutes later, he hears tiny, rapid footsteps. The doors burst open, the sound of dripping water audible. Quan Chi’s head shoots up. He puts his papers out of reach just in time.

Nix grabs the leg of his pants in both hands and shakes back and forth with such violence she almost slams her face into his hip. Nathan bounces up and down, spouting words incomprehensibly. They are both waterlogged and running with diluted paint.

“THAT WAS _SO_ **_COOL!_** ” 

Quan Chi levels Reiko’s slack-jawed expression with a blank stare. “They’re quite durable.”

“WE  _ ARE _ ADORABLE!”

“That is  _ not _ what I said,” Quan Chi corrects.

“It’s what you meaaaant,” Nix sings, inexplicably. They need to get her music lessons.

“They’re insufferable,” Reiko sneers.

“Jokes on you, we don’t know what that means!” Nix continues to sing. They do, in fact, know what that means because Shang Tsung tells them that at least twice a week.

Quan Chi would like to sleep now. Preferably forever, but if he does that, who knows what mischief the twins will get into then.

“This meeting is adjourned,” he announces.

The twins cheer and begin marching around him, chanting in a language that no one else in the room knows. Quan Chi gathers his papers and ignores the puddle of paint-water collecting around him. There’s a reason his pants are black.

Reiko’s arm darts out and snatches Nix’s arm as she happens to pass too close. He glares down at her— as she is, in fact, the one how somehow ends up irritating him the most.

“Men don’t like girls who can’t shut up and behave.”

She blinks at him once, then throws her head back and screams so loud that even Quan Chi’s ears ring. And while everyone is still recovering, Nix draws her foot back and kicks him in the shin hard enough that his metal armor dents. Nathan, not to let her suffer alone, launches a pillow at his head with such force that it explodes on impact.

Quan Chi sighs, catches them both around the middle, and hauls them up like wiggly luggage. He leaves the meeting chamber with them like that, and doesn’t set them down until they’ve reached the kitchens where a snack will distract them. He briefly considers warning Shang Tsung of what will undoubtedly be a  _ horrifying _ response to this outrage, then remembers that he stole Quan Chi’s notes on a complicated spell the day before, and decides not to.

“I’m gonna steal his teeth!” Nix announces, slamming her tiny hands on a counter she can barely reach.

Her sudden obsession with teeth is starting to concern him.

“I want his kneecaps on my desk by tomorrow!” Nathan agrees. Quan Chi said this exact phrase last week while he’d mistakenly thought the twins were distracted by climbing the shelves of his office.

“No,” Quan Chi says, because there’s a very real possibility that they’ll find a way to make it happen.

“Reparations!” Nix cries.

“Reparations!” Nathan joins.

They start banging their fists on the counters, chanting once more, until one of the cooks sets a plate of their favorite snack in front of them. Again, eating is the only time they are silent, but Quan Chi can sense that there is a storm gathering in the quiet now.

He sighs.

“You may not kill him,” he tells them.

They peer at him, unblinking.

“You may, however, play with him until he leaves the palace.” Or, more accurately, is driven out altogether.

They stuff the rest of their snack in their mouths and disappear in the blink of an eye. In a distant hall of the palace, there’s a very manly shriek.

Quan Chi retreats to his office to enjoy the thirty minutes of peace this brilliant parenting maneuver has bought him. He still has to wash the paint out of Nix’s hair, and replace the clothes Nathan has destroyed beyond even magical repair. But that's for later. Right now, he’s got half an hour to finish the last of his paperwork.

All in all, this has been one of his easier days with the twins. He has no such hope for tomorrow.


End file.
